R.I.P.

Today, the Guardian carried an obituary of The Welfare State. As the Coalition continued their blunderbuss assault on the weak, the marginalised, the disabled and anyone else who is "not one of us" with their capping benefit rises at 1%, the Guardian's piece saw it as just about the last nail in Welfare's coffin. It may not quite be all over for Beveridge's brilliant design, but it is looking like a very, very precarious 'support' for those who require assistance in their time of need. More and more will begin to fall through the cracks in the fractured provision that is arising from the work of the wrecking crew currently in power.

It is lazy to accept that the George Osborne and Daily Mail view - a group of feckless, work-shy spongers and ne'er-do-wells - represents the 'norm' amongst benefit recipients. As with any grouping, it is far from homogenous and for every 'scrounger' that the DM unearths or Osborne vilifies, there are ten, fifty, a hundred people who want to work but are unable to find a job in the current market. As you may have noticed, we are in a (double- or treble-dip) recession.

The Welfare system probably had people who realised the potential for exploiting it for their own ends right from day one. However, the majority of people at that time could remember the hardships of slum housing, of having to spend the food money in order to pay for a visit by the doctor or having the barest of financial support when they were out of work. They were grateful for the support provided by the new system and chose not to abuse what it had to offer because they understood that to swindle it was, in effect, to steal from their neighbours, families in exactly the same position as themselves.

The things that are really dying as the Welfare State staggers, suffering death by a thousand cuts, are community, a sense of belonging, the knowledge that those of us in work should support those who are temporarily without a job, the humility to put society's welfare ahead of our individual need because we believe that a strong society benefits all, not just the few. Margaret Thatcher famously once said that there was no such thing as 'society'. She was wrong when she said that, but her heirs are hell-bent on ensuring that it comes to pass. As we cut the ties between each other and turn in on ourselves and look solely to tend to our own needs, so we play into the hands of those in power: divide and rule.

As we move away from a Welfare State and embrace a US-style everyone-for-theselves approach to life, we will be waving goodbye to so much more than the command economy anachronism the Daily Mail sees. We will be laying to rest something that once helped bind us together. It is ironic that the Mail constantly runs pieces whose subtexts lament the passing of Olde England whilst all the time hammering away at the very institutions that once defined us as 'great'. R.I.P. indeed.

Edit: Spookily, this piece in the Guardian says pretty much what I have been fumbling to say in the above http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/08/welfare-problem-real-scroungers-greedy